Year: 2012

As part of creating the app platform for Windows Store apps, one of our primary goals was to ensure that customers have confidence in their apps. We want customers to be confident that their apps will work as they expect, co-exist with other apps, and uninstall cleanly. This confidence comes from a variety of sources…

In Windows 8, sharing is a ubiquitous experience and a natural user expectation. Users often come across content in your app that they’re excited to share with friends or use in another app. As a developer you can meet this user expectation by using the Share contract which provides a lightweight, contextual and easy model…

When we started working on the new Windows 8 development platform one of the first questions we had was “how do you package an app into a simple yet secure format?” Before Windows 8 there were two primary installation technologies: Windows Installer and ClickOnce. As discussed in the Delivering reliable and trustworthy apps blog post,…

Play To Overview The Play To feature allows you to stream music, photos and videos from apps to Xbox and other supported devices on your home network. Imagine being able to easily flick photos and videos from your app to the big screen TV. Or music from your app to your living room speakers. Using…

In the blog post for testing Windows Store apps, we discussed what to test at the various runtime states for your app. We also discussed a few aspects of the Windows 8 user experience and how that affects the environment your app lives in. Now, we explore the new user experience a bit further and…

Today we introduce Windows Store App Labs in more than 30 cities around the world for all app builders – developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. Windows Store App Labs are places where you can access the newest Windows 8 devices, get technical help from Windows experts, and receive design guidance from leading edge designers and digital…

You may already know that one of the most powerful features of the Windows 8 XAML platform is the flexibility the platform provides to create custom controls. XAML provides features like Dependency Properties and Control Templates that make it easy to create feature-rich and customizable controls. In the last post, “Building a custom control using…

If you have developed Windows Store apps using JavaScript, you most likely have encountered the Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS). This library provides you with a set of CSS styles, JavaScript controls and utilities to help you quickly build apps that meet the UX guidelines for the Windows Store. Among the utilities provided by WinJS…

Windows 8 was designed to work better in more locales all over the world. Working with developers like you, we can complete these globalized experiences by releasing apps that are relevant in more locations around the world. By translating using machine translation or localizing using a human translator, you can make your Windows Store app…

When we reimagined Windows, we took the opportunity to rethink all the different aspects of printing – the user experience, the developer platform, and the broad device ecosystem – and how they work together to give a great overall experience. In this post, I give an overview of the user experience and the developer platform…